GW1’s assassin was a mess. Reliance on a single easily-removed enchant to survive in PvE, no utility besides raw DPS, one-trick glass cannon that had to go all out into an easily-countered offense in PvP, etc.
I’m sorry, but I’m calling bullcrap on that PvE part. If you’re talking about Aura of Displacement, which I assume you are, you are SADLY mistaken. As an Assassin main in GW1, and a very successful Assassin, I never touched Aura once in PvE, and had a whole repertoire of successful, powerful, interesting, and non-PvX assassin builds that I used in PvE. I survived in PvE pretty darn well without AoD or PvX gimmicks, while dealing good to excellent damage and/or leaving mobs a mess with conditions. I usually refrain from the following statement, but in this case, I’ll make an exception: you’re just bad…at assassin.
Now, on to the main subject;
I can’t really say which I prefer. I like both the Assassin and the Thief. It’s hard to compare the two classes, when the combat mechanics for the two games are so completely different.
Yeah, I mained assassin too. So what? Ultimately the Assassin had one good use in PvE, and that was piling on DPS with Death Blossom spam. You could play some other builds too, but never as well as the original class (i.e. scythe sin was okay but just being a dervish was better). That said, DB spam was insanely high DPS, but raw DPS was never what anyone wanted in a teammate; compared to other classes who could still dish out respectable damage while providing a free, unlimited tank (Ranger), buff the entire party with defensive wards (Elementalist) or heal everyone (Ritualist), the Assassin just wasn’t worth it. You get the idea. By comparison the thief has a whole range of control and support options that not only make him useful in a group, but downright indispensable (Choking Gas and Smoke Screen, anyone?).
Also, the assassin had two severe issues that would get you killed 95% of the time. One, you relied on enchants to keep yourself alive. Not a whole bunch of spammable enchants, like the Dervish, either; you pretty much relied exclusively on Critical Agility, which was really good when it was up, but if it got stripped (and tons of mobs had enchant removal en masse) you were pretty much dead. Also, the skill-chaining system meant you effectively only had one attack; that attack got shut down (either they interrupted, blocked, or Diversion’d a skill in your chain) and you were completely useless until it recharged.
So, yeah.
GW1’s assassin was a mess. Reliance on a single easily-removed enchant to survive in PvE, no utility besides raw DPS, one-trick glass cannon that had to go all out into an easily-countered offense in PvP, etc.
By comparison, the thief is much more balanced. He is squishy but has decent options to keep from dying all the time (ranged weapons, AoE blind and weakness, moves that give temporary invul), decent sustained DPS along with powerful burst options, and most importantly, is actually useful to a team in both PvE and PvP.
If you’re complaining about the current state of the thief you clearly didn’t get to play him in beta. Especially the second one, he was downright terrible in the second beta. The current thief is, like, super godmode compared to beta thief.
Sword #2 what.
That makes no sense and is a terrible idea. Death Blossom is meant to be a purely condition damage skill to begin with. If you’re running a power build the answer to dealing with Death Blossom’s low damage is simply not to use it.
Also, building crit is perfectly viable with a condition damage build. Just use Rampager’s if you prefer a higher crit rate, or Rabid if you want to max out damage per bleed, then use a Sigil of Earth or something to maximize your gain from the crits. I agree that building power and condition damage at the same time is a bad idea, which is why, you know, you don’t do it.
It drops aggro on the jaguar. Situational but it does have its uses.
You should note that for the thief, they have an additional skill listed on the tooltip that’s their stealth skill, which only appears when they’re in stealth. So you should see as many as four skills when you mouse over, but only the first three are the auto-attack chain.
In general, when a skill is capable of “changing” due to some condition, the alternate forms of the skill will be listed above the current one when out of combat. You’ll notice this under Cluster Bomb and Infiltrator’s Strike, too.
This might not actually be a bug, but I’ll bring it up in case it is.
Certain skills do not queue properly; for example, using Symbol of Wrath, Flashing Blade, Leap of Faith, and any spirit weapon summon on the guardian, then trying to queue another skill will cause the second skill to start animating like it’s queued, but then the first skill completes and the second skill just doesn’t happen.
At first I thought it was a result of some kind of queue timeout, but it seems to happen regardless of how long or short the wait between the two skills is. At the same time I’ve been able to queue other skills with fairly lengthy cast times. I believe ZD > another skill queues properly.
This happened to me primarily in Blazeridge Steppes. The guardian’s third auto-attack skill, Sword Wave, completely whiffs on environmental objects (i.e. Ogre Supplies, Inquest Lab Table, etc.) for no apparent reason. The attack just goes clean through the object and deals no damage and does not register as a hit. I just sit there doing Sword Wave 2-3 times in a row until the chain resets. I’ve tried moving around a bit and repositioning, changing elevation, etc. but it doesn’t seem to help.
Did a search for “rune of monk”, “rune of the monk”, and just “monk”. No results for any of them. Went through runes manually, didn’t see it. Not like it’s unavailable or anything, I just can’t find it.